


Fine Feathers

by Philomytha



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:34:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24196774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philomytha/pseuds/Philomytha
Summary: "Fuck me," I said. "You've got wings."
Relationships: Peter Grant/Thomas Nightingale
Comments: 21
Kudos: 239
Collections: Hurt Comfort Exchange 2020





	Fine Feathers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fairleigh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fairleigh/gifts).



I don't make a habit of worrying when Nightingale goes out on a shout and leaves me to mind the shop and get on with my Latin homework. The thing is, I'm an apprentice with a couple of years experience of setting the lab on fire whenever I try a new spell, but Nightingale has been a practicing wizard since about 1915 and has been getting better every year. I heard a pretty scary witch he beat round the houses--literally--in a magical duel talking about it afterwards like a star-struck groupie. So I don't worry about Nightingale. 

He'd left me with a dictionary and a brief to compose poetry in Latin, and I was struggling through some really bad attempts at being rude in Latin verse--Nightingale had introduced me to Catullus and I felt like I'd found a kindred spirit in classical literature at last--while he went out to investigate some reports of eldritch screaming in Hyde Park. I think he'd wanted an excuse to go out for a walk, because he took Toby with him. It was the first sunny day in weeks, and I wouldn't have minded being sent out to do the legwork, but rank hath its privileges and this time Nightingale was using that privilege to get out in the sunshine while it lasted. 

I was just contemplating going down to the kitchen to get myself a cup of tea--because while Molly will silently sneak up on Nightingale and deposit full teacups reverently beside him, I have to find my own--when the main door swung open and Nightingale came back in. Toby, released from the lead, came racing over, scattered several failed attempts at verse which I had left on the floor, then scampered down the kitchen stairs to look for Molly and food. 

Nightingale came over to where I was working, walking slowly as if he was tired, and I wondered if that meant he was tired enough to not want to put me through my Latin paces before dinner. Perhaps he might be interested in some de-stressing activities. 

He gave me a bit of a smile, but then straightened up and looked at the whirlwind of papers instead of me. "Translation going well?" 

Workplace relationships can interfere with doing the job, we were told at Hendon in a hopeless sort of way, as if it might be possible to put us off. It wasn't: after Skygarden, and the thing with the fairies, not to mention the thing at Kew that totally wasn't my fault, well, one thing let to another. I don't use words like 'relationship', and Nightingale sticks to 'lover', but, we eat meals together and sit around watching TV together and go chase magical monsters together. So after that, sleeping together isn't that much of a stretch. Not that sleeping is involved as such. Anyway, it's not just us: I personally knew of seven other coppers in relationships with each other--and don't ask why it's an odd number, that's not my story to tell--which is why they warn us at Hendon. The trick, as much as there was one, was to be able to operate in both a professional mode and a personal mode with the same person. And Nightingale was still definitely in work mode, and that meant I had to be in work mode too. That's the trouble with this, I always feel like I have to live up to his example. 

"Ita vero," I said, which made him grimace and draw breath for his lecture on how we don't actually know whether the Romans used the phrases I found in my joke Latin phrasebook. But he stopped himself with truly heroic restraint, and came over to perch on the edge of another of the chairs in the atrium. In atrio, in Latin. 

"How are the trees?" I asked in return. "Stopped screaming now?" 

"It was a dragon," he said, which made me forget all about my Latin. "A dragonet. It must have mislaid its parents somewhere. I returned it to the nest." 

Dragons. Nightingale had told me years ago that everything was real, and so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that this included dragons, but still: dragons. I had so many questions that I couldn't stop thinking of them for long enough to ask one. "Dragons," I finally said. "Dragons live in Hyde Park?"

"The nest was at the top of One Canada Square," he said. "They like skyscrapers." 

"And you, what, released the dragonet there and it went back home to Mum and Dad?" 

"Something like that," he said, and picked up my most recent draft of Latin poetry, and it was subjunctives and spondees until dinner. My attempts at rude jokes weren't great, but one dick joke did make Nightingale crack a smile. You had to know him well to spot it, but over the past few months I've got to know Nightingale pretty well, in every sense. 

Molly had served one of her more unusual meals, a pie with whole fish heads looking up at you while you eat them, which frankly makes me consider going vegetarian except that my mum wouldn't like it. Nightingale was picking at his with even less enthusiasm than me. 

"So, dragons," I said after surreptitiously pushing the sardine head out of sight and eating the pastry instead. 

"Try Ambrosius," Nightingale said shortly. "I'm sure you'll be able to update the references for yourself. Castle turrets are in short supply in London, but skyscrapers provide a suitable alternative. They're largely invisible, but you can hear them." He got up from the table leaving his meal half-eaten. He was moving stiffly, his spine rigid and shoulders tense. I've seen him like that before, after he was shot, and I was starting to feel suspicious. 

"You okay?" I asked, as casually as I could. 

"I'm fine," he said, which I could have predicted, and I didn't ask again. 

On my way back from researching dragons in the library, I took the shortcut through the smoking room, now the non-smoking room. It was dark, and I thought Nightingale had already gone upstairs, so I did a full cartoon-style double-take when I heard him suddenly move on the far side of the room. He was standing behind a leather wing chair, leaning on the back of it, and there was something really weird about his silhouette, like he was wearing a huge rucksack and was trying to adjust it. 

"Sorry, didn't see you there," I said, but his only answer was an odd pained sound. I turned on the lights. 

Nightingale wasn't wearing a rucksack. He'd taken off his suit jacket and was just in his shirtsleeves, and he had something different on his back, something it took me a while to recognise. But then he turned as I came over, and I knew I wasn't mistaken. He had wings, great dark wings folded against his back. I could see the feathers, long neat rows of them with soft rounded tips, and when he turned, the wings moved with him, so naturally that they looked like really good special effects on TV. 

"Fuck me," I said. "You've got wings." Nightingale straightened up, then stumbled and caught hold of the chair back again, his breath coming in sharply. The wings vanished, but he didn't let go of the chair. I stared, trying to make sense of them, and then the wings were back again, and this time I felt the _vestigia_ like a trill of birdsong and distant laughter. It wasn't like Nightingale's _signare_ at all, and I started towards him. 

"Who did that?" I demanded. 

Nightingale turned to look at me, and one look at his face killed the next question on my lips. I've seen those agonised lines around his eyes before and I didn't like it then any more than I did now. 

"Peter," he said hoarsely, "I need you to make yourself useful and never mind all your questions right now." 

One of the wings was folded neatly, I saw as I got closer. The other was half-extended at an awkward angle, and as I looked more carefully I saw the feathers were in disarray, and some had caked blood and unpleasant slimy dirt smeared all over them. 

"You've got wings," I said again, because I'm not good at keeping my mouth shut. At his glare I said quickly, "Yes, okay, questions later. That doesn't look good." 

"One of the adult dragons caught me, when I was returning the dragonet."

"It looks painful," I said, which was almost as stupid a remark as 'you've got wings'. Nightingale didn't even bother to glare at me. I took a closer look at the wing. It was the lower half that had been mangled, feathers torn out and snapped off halfway and bloodied. I couldn't tell whether or not it was broken, but it looked bad. 

"Doesn't this need a doctor?" Or a vet, I managed not to say. 

"I've injured them before," he said. "They always healed themselves, if I dismissed them and then called them back again, they would come back undamaged. I don't understand why they haven't this time. I've tried... several times." As I watched, he did it again, and I heard the laughter and birdsong as the wings vanished, and then again as they came back. There were small, remarkably neat rips in the back of his shirt that they extended through, and I could just see where they joined his body behind the shoulderblades. The _vestigia_ didn't prevent me from also hearing the little grunt he made as they came back, as if I'd landed a hard blow on him during our boxing lessons. "I can feel it even when they're not there, not quite as badly, but--"

"You've been waiting on this all evening?" I asked. 

Nightingale didn't shrug, but I sensed he would have done if it hadn't been so painful. "Thought it might get better on its own." 

I bet they hear that a lot in the hospital, I also managed to avoid saying. Instead I said, "What's this gunk all over them?" Up close I could see something that wasn't blood smeared across the feathers, thick and glistening unpleasantly in the light. 

Nightingale moved the injured wing forwards slightly and craned his neck to see. "The dragon bit that one," he said in explanation. 

"Dragon drool," I said. "Nice. Do you think that's the problem?" 

He frowned at it. "Possibly. It may be stopping them from healing somehow. If I can get it off--" He tried to mantle the wing forward, reaching across with his opposite arm, but aborted the movement with a half-choked sound. 

I looked away from him. "You should have said something." It's not that I was surprised he hadn't, exactly. After all, he hadn't ever mentioned that he could magically grow wings either. 

"I'm sure I can manage," he said stiffly, and I looked back. "I think you may be right. I just need to wash it off." He pushed himself upright and walked briskly across to the door, and if it hadn't been for the injured wing hanging awkwardly behind him I would never have known he was hurt. 

He headed towards the main stairs and I caught him up. I didn't say anything, but he didn't suggest I leave either. Halfway up the stairs, he paused, hand clenched on the bannister, and he didn't object when I put my hand on his back in support, carefully between and below the wings. 

The Folly doesn't have showers, but it does have some fairly palatial bathrooms on the first floor. The ones on my floor are a lot smaller and less impressive, but the first floor ones were for the senior wizards and important guests and so forth. Nightingale made for one of them. It was bigger than my childhood bedroom and my parents' bedroom put together, and it had a giant claw-foot bathtub as well as an ornate porcelain sink and several chairs. I pulled one of the chairs over next to the bath, and Nightingale sank onto it backwards, straddling it so that he could lean forwards against the seat back and let the wings have plenty of space. I put the plug in the bath and began to fill it and added lots of soap. Nightingale didn't say anything, and neither did I. At least I had something to do. 

To the best of my knowledge, nobody'd used this bathroom in decades, but nonetheless it was fully stocked with bath towels, hand towels and flannels, freshly laundered and neatly folded. I selected a big flannel and got it wet and soapy. 

"All right," Nightingale said in a very level voice, "do your worst." He extended the injured wing over the bath as far as he could, his lips pressed together tightly. 

If a herd of gazelles are running from a lion and one of them trips and falls and breaks his leg, the other gazelles don't try to carry him with them. That's something people do. So you could say first aid began as soon as people began, as soon as Og's friend Zog fell out of a tree and Og carried him home and kept him fed and safe until he could walk again. But once people discovered how to burn coal and make powerful machines with spinning bits of metal and jets of steam all over the place, industrial accidents began, and people began to get suddenly injured in civilian life on a scale previously only seen on battlefields. Now the Victorian working poor didn't have a lot of access to doctors, but they did have Victorian do-gooders. One such lot of do-gooders were the Venerable Order of Saint John, who after crusading had mostly stopped as a hobby, didn't have a lot to do. They started training ordinary people in the most dangerous workplaces to patch up their fellow workers after the train derailed or the boiler exploded, and that's how modern civilian first-aid began. 

Now the police aren't the ambulance service, but we're first on the scene of disaster often enough that we get a fairly intensive training in first aid too. And I've had to use it, and not always under standard conditions, either. I've tied my best friend's face back on and I've pulled a steel bar out of someone mostly human and I've knelt in the road with my hand pressed against a gunshot wound--I could see the scar right there on Nightingale's back below where the wing emerged. The rule is, you get on and follow your training. The casualty doesn't need your feelings, they need your trained skills, right now. 

None of my training had covered wings. But when you've got a casualty in front of you needing help, you've got to get stuck in anyway. I took my soapy wet flannel in one hand and took hold of his wing above where it was injured to hold it steady, and began to wipe at the obvious globs of dragon spit. Nightingale gasped at the first touch, but when I tried to go more gently the second time he muttered, "No, carry on, it's all right." 

The feathers grew in layers, long strong flight pinions at the lower edge and fanning out around the wingtip, rows of shorter feathers layered from top to bottom, and fine down at the base covering the bones. They were dark brown on the top, a pale creamy colour on the underside, with hints of red around the wingtip like he'd been really careful with a henna dye. Nightingale-coloured. I started with the easier bits, where the wing seemed mostly undamaged apart from some snapped and missing feathers, and got a lot of it off. The dragon spit was sticky and had worked its way down in between feathers to the underlying structure of the wing, and I had to gently pull the feathers back to get at it all. 

"All right," Nightingale said in a strained voice after I'd been working for about five minutes, "ask your questions. Talk." 

Distract me, I realised is what he meant. I carefully worked my way down another feather. Now that he wanted me to ask questions about the wings, I couldn't think of any. 

"You can fly," I tried, rinsing my cloth off. "You returned the baby dragonet to its nest by flying up there with it. Is that right?" 

"Correct." 

Everyone complains that I'm too easily distracted, but honestly, I was grateful for it then, because the next feather was snapped halfway, and Nightingale hissed when I touched it. "I don't understand how that's even possible," I said quickly. "You ought to be too heavy to fly, even with these wings. How big are they, about a meter and a half each?" I don't know the precise calculations for how big a bird's wings need to be for its weight, but humans don't have hollow bones or any of the other adaptations that makes it possible for birds to fly. These wings weren't that much bigger than a swan's wingspan, but Nightingale was a lot heavier than a swan. I let myself ponder that while my hands kept going. 

"Trust you to pick on the numbers," Nightingale muttered as I worked around the base of the damaged feather. I could see his hands gripping the spindles of the chair's back. "I can fly. It's magic, Peter." 

"How did you--where did they come from? Have they been there all along?" 

"I can call on them at will." Nightingale was speaking in short bursts, his breathing shallow. "When I want them, they're here. When I don't, they go." 

"They're not, like, invisible or something, though." They couldn't be invisible, he'd never get into the Jag's driving seat with these on his back whether visible or not. I'd have noticed them in bed, come to think of it. "They disappear. And when they reappear, they're connected up to you. Connected up enough that you can feel when they're hurt and you bleed from them. Do you have any idea how ridiculous that is?" 

"I could feel them even when they weren't there," Nightingale volunteered. "Before, when I hurt them, when I sent them away they healed themselves. This time they didn't." 

I got through the next three feathers without too much trouble, then we were on the bit where the underlying wing was obviously broken. 

"Can I get wings like this?" I asked. Certain moments in the past couple of years would have been a lot less stressful if I'd had magic wings. Skygarden would have gone differently, for sure. I began to wipe the dragon slime off, and jarred the alignment of the damaged bone. Nightingale exhaled sharply, and what little colour in his face drained away. "Sorry," I muttered. It was, as far as I could tell, a closed fracture, no bone poking out, no blood. Small mercies. 

"Keep going," he said through gritted teeth, leaning forward and resting his head against the chair as if the effort of holding it up was too much. I kept going. Here the dragon slime had soaked everything, and I had to clean it relentlessly, trying to hold the broken wing completely still with one hand. Have you ever tried to scrub something without moving it? It's not possible. I thought I would probably have nightmares about this, one day, about the effort Nightingale was making to stay quiet and the gory mess in my hands. But at least when I had nightmares about it, it would be over. Something to look forward to.

"No," said Nightingale after a while, and I thought he was telling me to stop and then realised he was answering my question. I'd forgotten I'd asked it. Distraction can only get you so far. "You can't. They were a gift. From a fairy. In 1931, in Italy." 

"Huh," I said, and began to clean the long pinions at the tip of the wing. Half of them had been ripped out, leaving bloody holes that made me feel sick to look at them. I tried to remember what I'd been asking about. "Just my luck," I managed. No wings for me. Nightingale was fading out, his grip on the chair going slack, but if he actually fainted and fell off it he would hurt the wing even more, and I couldn't let go of it and catch him in time. "What did you do?" I asked more loudly. "I mean, why did he give them to you?" 

Nightingale blinked at me. "Oh," he said weakly, "yes. That was a tight spot." He gasped again as I cleaned the underside of the pinions. "I saved his life," he went on. "It was a bit of a tight spot. Flying was the only way out. He couldn't fly, but he gave me wings, and I flew us both out." 

"You can carry someone else?" I asked, genuinely distracted despite myself. Flying in a plane is not the same thing as actually flying, if Nightingale could fly with me... "That makes the weight to wing area calculation even more ridiculous," I said instead. 

"Get these fixed," he whispered, as if he was reading my mind, "and you'll see. You can do ... all the calculations you like. Later."

The broken bone moved again under my hand, but Nightingale didn't flinch, as if he were already in so much pain that more didn't register. I rinsed my flannel and scrubbed the last feather. 

"That's it," I said. "I think it's all off. I'm going to rinse it really well now." There was a jug on the windowledge, something that had been part of an old-fashioned washstand once, I thought. I filled it with more soapy water and began to pour it over the wing, letting it drip down into the bathtub, using my hand to make sure it got into all the feathers. I couldn't feel the dragon slime at all now, just wet feathers with their strong spines and little soft bits of fluff at the bases. Nightingale didn't move, breathing fast and light. "I think that's done," I said at last.

Nightingale didn't respond at once. I let go of the wing and went to face him. "It's done," I repeated, putting a hand on his face to get his attention. He opened his eyes and stared at me blankly. 

"It's done," I said again. "You need to do your disappearing thing with the wings now, and see if that works." 

Nightingale moved his hand, and I took it. "All right," he breathed. 

Doing magic when you're in serious pain is not easy, and it didn't look like this was any easier. Nightingale gripped my hand, the wings vanished, and he let out a long sigh and released me. I went and got a glass of water; Nightingale took it shakily and drank. "Time to try it out," he said. His eyes were strained and tense and, I realised grimly, afraid. Afraid it wouldn't work. 

Another blink, the trill of laughter and birdsong, and the wings were back. I stared at them, afraid to look, and Nightingale gave a long, long sigh and nearly did slide off the chair. I caught him, wrapping my arm around his waist under the wings, and he sat up again, then began to spread his wings. 

"Yes," he breathed. "That worked." 

He extended his left wing to its full length. I reached out and ran my fingers into the dark feathers on the left wing, and Nightingale sighed. The colour was returning to his face. I felt along curiously: there was no sign of the broken bone, all the feathers were neat and whole, not even damp. I combed my fingers along them and felt right down into the soft down, allowing myself to be purely interested in the wing now, without worry. I slid a pinion between my fingers, and Nightingale looked over his shoulder at me. He was smiling, and I felt my own tension begin to release as I saw that.

"Ah--Peter," he said. I stroked the feathers again, looking for any sign of the earlier damage, my fingers working carefully between the delicate layers. Nightingale caught his breath again, but not as if I'd hurt him. I looked up in surprise. 

"If you're going to keep doing that," he said, "I'm going to want to go somewhere else." 

"Oh," I said. _Oh._ "I can't believe you've had these all along and never mentioned it." 

"I have to confess," Nightingale said softly, "I didn't realise it would have this effect." 

"I think it's something I'm going to want to investigate." I tugged just a little at a pinion with one hand while the other slid into the feathers on his other wing. Nightingale gave a little gasp and moved closer. 

"Never let it be said," Nightingale replied, his voice as controlled now as it had been earlier, "that I stood between you and your scientific curiosity." He stood up, one wing folded over me. "Come on." 

It was one of the most satisfactory scientific investigations I've ever done.


End file.
